History

Creation

I started poliastro as a wrapper of some MATLAB and Fortran algorithms that I needed for a University project: having good performance was a must, so pure Python was not an option. As a three language project, it was only known to work in my computer, and I had to fight against oct2py and f2py for long hours.

Later on, I enhanced the plotting capabilities of poliastro to serve me in additional university tasks. I removed the MATLAB (Octave) code and kept only the Fortran algorithms. Finally, when numba was mature enough, I implemented everything in pure Python and poliastro 0.3 was born.

Future ideas

poliastro has been historically focused on interplanetary applications, so we would like to improve its Earth-specific capabilities in the future, for example:

  • High order gravitational model for the Earth

  • Input/output of TLE and other GP data format

  • Attitude & dynamics

And in general, we would like to stabilize the API and release a 1.0 version at some point!

Acknowledgement from the original author

I am Juan Luis Cano Rodríguez (two names and two surnames, it’s the Spanish way!), an Aerospace Engineer with a passion for Astrodynamics and the Open Source world. Before poliastro started to be a truly community project, I started it when I was an Erasmus student at Politecnico di Milano, an important technical university in Italy which deeply influenced my life and ambitions and gave name to the library itself. It is and always will be my tiny tribute to a country that will always be in my heart and to people that never ceased to inspire me. Grazie mille!